was just listening to that old This American Life about books that change your life.  the opening concerns a woman who fell in love with Moss Hart’s autobiography because it was one of the books that her playwright grandfather left when he died and it had markings in the margins. she became so obsessed with the book that she memorized passages and eventually tried to memorize the whole book.

this last bit struck me as crazy and impossible until i remembered that i tried to memorize whole movies when i was a kid (Gone with the Wind, for one —sorry if anyone has a bad reaction to that movie title. i know it’s full of paternal racism now. didn’t then. still love it for other reasons anyway). I used to memorize cast lists and try to play whole movies in my head. I specifically remember doing this on a middle school field trip to a science museum because i felt so left out and awkward on the bus and at lunch in their museum cafeteria and i tried to keep myself company this way. I won’t say what movie it was, because it’s embarrassing that it’s not Last Year at Marienbad or something. I will say that “this is steff’s party, Blane. you shouldn’t be allowed to invite just anybody.”

it would never occur to me now to memorize a favorite book or film. i don’t think it would occur to any of us to memorize the thriller dance like we did then or try to remake the lazy sunday video shot for shot like they do now.  i think this is a part of play or a bridge between play and adult work that comes between about age 8 and about age 18. and i think the clinical name for it is nerding out. i also think it has something to do with my 12 year-old urge to visit every standing landmark where my favorite beheaded british monarch ever slept or ate or peed, even though that served no practice-for-future work purpose, except maybe as prep for historiography or something.

i wish i still wanted to do stuff like this. i think i look for that feeling of obsession or addiction or commune  in books and movies and video games and even people now, but the older i get, the harder it is to find, and the more i realize that i have to go out and make my own stuff in order to recapture it. which is the point, i guess. if kids never outgrew playing with trucks and trains, we’d have no engineers.

this post didn’t recapture that feeling for me, by the way. article-length or longer, i think.

what i post on twitter goes to facebook and what i post on facebook goes to 400 people, many of whom, because we grew up together in the midwest, may or may not think i’m bragging when i post about Dan’s show or the Emmy’s.  and sometimes I am. But sometimes i just want to tell 101 people and other close friends who know me in LA about something awesome even though i’m stuck in my apartment packing for the move or covering scripts or whatever. so now i’ve got tumblr and google reader reposting for that. because tumblr people either know me in LA or don’t know me anywhere but Tumblr.

preamble over. here is a list of funny people who we met (or I met, since in many cases Dan already had at some point) after the Emmy’s:

• Bob Odenkirk
• Wyatt Cenac*
• Kevin Nealon*
• Kate Flannery (‘Meredith,’ on “the office”)
• Sarah Silverman
• Seth Meyers
• Scott Adsit **
• Aubrey Plaza***

(I forgot some. It was so weird. There were so many and most of them wanted to tell Dan how great his speech was and talk about his TV show and stuff. Almost as surreal as the fact that he won, which none of us was expecting).

People who came over and talked to Rob and Kate on the other side of our table, but with whom i was too shy to go and join in:

• Kathy Griffin
• JJ Abrams

Unintentionally funny people who I did not meet, but who I saw and wanted to punch in the mouth as they walked by:

• Ben Lyons

There were 30 other cool things that happened last night. I wish you guys were there. That would’ve made it even better.

*people to whom I said something stupid.

**people to whom I said nothing but smart things, but who I then forced to smell my hands because the cocobutter lotion in the bathroom was ridiculously strong and was making me want to puke and I needed them to know about it.

***people who I met during the show because they were Ben Schwartz’s date, but who i wasn’t sure were the actress from Funny People and Parks and Rec until i looked them up just now.

I wonder how “I go to a lot of shows” came to be the accepted phrase for expressing one’s musical elitism.

what was wrong with “I enjoy listening to live music”?

or, “I attend rock concerts of many of my favorite bands”?

or, “I masturbate to pitchfork every morning”?

or, “If it has a catchy melody, it can go fuck itself”?

or, “Did you notice that there is a chain attached to my wallet?”

I guess those are all a little direct.

Woke this morning to find that my things in the bathroom had been tidied.  Since my roommate will casually set down a t-shirt on the coffee table and leave it there for 6 months if i don’t move it, I’m assuming this is the work of his 12:30am booty call. Thanks, booty call lady. You have made me burn with anger.

I tidy things. I am a tidier.  I have tidy issues. I will make my boyfriend’s bed and put everything in his living room at right angles. I don’t do this for him. I do it for me. So that I can work on my laptop in peace, without thinking about how that plastic set of truck nuts is off center and DOES NOT GO THAT WAY. In other words, I understand the urge to tidy.

Onlyguesswhat? I didn’t start doing this until he was my boyfriend, and more importantly, my boyfriend doesn’t live with anyone, especially not another girl.  If he did, and if i was merely dating him or boning with him once in the middle of the night, I would not tidy or rearrange common areas.  And i wouldn’t tidy up his female roommate’s obviously women’s hair products and deoderants, ever, nor would i ONLY tidy up her stuff. Because I’d worry that a) since it’s my first time ever in his house, it might be construed as rude, that b) his female roommate might take me tidying her things as an insinuation that she was slovenly and a silent instruction from me, miss midnight makeout manners, on how to be a good woman and c) that the female roommate in question might actually be so anal retentive about neatness (in her apartment in which male roommate only rents a room) that her leaving deoderant on its side for once in her life was actually a conscious, “fuck keeping things clean, i hate it here now and will clean when he’s gone,” reaction to how much the non-dish-doing guy i was sleeping with has pissed her off by not paying his rent or bills for the final 6 weeks of his tenancy and given all this that d) if i did tidy her things, she might want to punch my face.

having considered all of these things i would just pee and go back to bed. that’s what I would do. but i am not my roommate’s booty call.  and i am grateful for that, because in case you hadn’t picked up on it yet, my roommate annoys me.

1. ErinHill2Bottom line, 500 Days of Summer? Don’t coyly remake Annie Hall if the only new things you bring to the table are lazy V.O. and skinny ties.18 minutes ago from web
3. ErinHill2no offense, 500 Days of Summer, but i think the people who made you might’ve learned all they know about love while looking in a mirror.21 minutes ago from web
4. ErinHill2no offense, 500 DOS, but I’m not sure an aspiring architect has to get inspired by love to quit his day job and sketch a hit building.22 minutes ago from web
5. ErinHill2no offense, 500 Days of Summer, but you set too much store in how much I like bluebirds, animated, wall-papered, on barrets, and otherwise.24 minutes ago from web
6. ErinHill2no offense, 500 DOS, but if you set a movie about the prettiest girl in the world in L.A., you have to explain why she’s not an actress.25 minutes ago from web
7. ErinHill2no offense, 500 Days of Summer, but it’s weird that your characters live in apts that Wes Anderson seems to have furnished. They’re only 25.26 minutes ago from web
8. ErinHill2no offense, 500 Days of Summer, but while i get that SHE’S cute,what’s in it for the hetero women? I might as well be kissing my own hand.29 minutes ago from web
9. ErinHill2no offense,500 Days of Summer, but movies about love are supposed to make me feel bad about my real, warts-and-all relationship, not better.31 minutes ago from web
10. ErinHill2no offense,500 Days of Summer, but that Karaoke scene is the reason people stopped putting Karaoke scenes in their movies.32 minutes ago from web
11. ErinHill2no offense, 500 Days o’Summer, but setting your movie in a greeting card company is as precocious as Zoey Deschanel’s affected singing voice33 minutes ago from web
12. ErinHill2no offense, 500 Days of Summer, but just because twee hipsters are doing it, doesn’t mean it’s not a cliche.36 minutes ago from web

pulled out of my space this morning and a 20 year-old neighbor and her 20 year-old friend with a strokes haircut almost hit me in a brand new mercedes that they didn’t buy. they were parking it before going into an apartment they don’t pay for. with starbucks drinks at 11am on a friday.

almost hit a woman with fake lips who was crossing the street against a light. i believe the reason she gave herself for not caring if it was her turn and assuming that i would not mind slamming on my brakes and almost getting hit by the oncoming traffic at the light change was that she was pretty.

ordered my rare roast beef sandwich at greenblatt’s and listened to three starving actors (2 boys and a girl) who were ordering lettuce on a plate and fruit salad and generally looking gaunt. they were discussing how to get heatlh care from sag during times of financial hardship (in other words, always).

ate and read while two guys sat down and started talking about their divorce cases and breakups and whether or not their women were pressing charges and how to pretend not to have a divorce lawyer while secretly figuring out how to keep everything. I think i heard one of them at one point say “security showed up and i said ‘look at my face,’ if you arrest me, you have to arrest her, too.”  I didn’t turn around to see if this guy was chris albrecht. when the waiter arrived, both men asked if he could send over the hot blonde waitress.  when it was explained she was on break, they pointed at a customer with “hot legs” who was walking up the stairs and said “she’d do, too.”  you never know when you’re going to meet the next future mrs. guy who talks loudly about hoarding money and hitting people he’s supposed to love at lunchtime.

the last guys made my skin crawl. the rest of them just annoyed me. kept reminding myself that this is what i signed up for by living here in surface city, Simulacrum, Fakesville CA. I’ve just insulated myself with smart people and interesting pursuits, but the stuff mentioned above will probably always predominate outside of the circle of merit i’ve drawn around myself via those people and pursuits.   i’m glad to be insulated.  i like this city that way. i don’t want to take the blinders off for everyday living or i’d have to move someplace like Austin, and i really don’t like “going to shows” enough to live there.  plus, the actors weren’t really hurting anyone. i guess if they didn’t try to starve themselves into a sitcom role, they’d never know if they could’ve.

My modus operandi around here (phd school) is to underplay what i do know and overplay what i don’t know. This is my kneejerk, rural wisconsin-raised reaction to everyone else doing the opposite, acting like snooty pantses, never admitting when they don’t understand or haven’t read something and speaking in opaque academese that only serves to obscure what they’re saying and make it less accessible to everyone but the little clique of people who have read everything they’ve ever read. Because in my opinion, that is not what i’m here for. I’m here to learn, I’m here to think and I’m here to communicate anything that my learning and thinking produces.

It backfires all the time. People whose enrollment in graduate school is just one symptom of their elitism usually have eithe very little life experience or perspective, or a chip on their shoulder, which means they’re also the kind of people who love to say “really?????” when I admit that I haven’t read (and don’t care to read) anything by Gilles Deleuze.  And delight in acting like I’m a rube. I’m not a rube. they know this and i know this. but i feel embarrassed anyway.

I just think that a person should be able to admit that they don’t know something, don’t understand something, or don’t like something. Or that they don’t care for delueze and don’t watch godard in their off hours because they prefer to read romance novels and watch wife swap. They should be able to admit all of this and still understand complex concepts. in reality, i think it’s necessary to admit where you come from and what you need to learn as the shortest distance between themselves and the complex concepts, and between those concepts and their students understanding them, too. so people who shame simple ignorance make me mad.

given all of the above, it’s hard to take an email from a mentor, shaming me for not remembering or having read something that I apparently should have by now.  Because it makes me have that kneejerk, furious, defensive reaction, but in this case it really is something i should know and i really am a bad person for not having read it or many other things that i was supposed to and didn’t.

That’s my other, more secret approach to academia: not reading 3/4 of what i have been given to read and then winging it because i’m lazy and a little afraid. i almost always get away with it at the time, because the first 1/4 of whatever the reading was gives me enough to come up with something smart to say, which is all i do because i’m an ideas person and i have no discipline.

but eventually that lack of reading wil wind up embarrassing me, and in my academic career, it always seems to happen with one particular mento who happens to be my idol and my dissertation chair. who i wrote an email asking which books to read on a certain subject and unwittingly showed my ass and caused him to come as close to scolding as he ever does, which makes me want to be angry and self-righteous because it feels like that thing that academic assholes do. only in this case it’s all my fault and i’m a total idiot and this incident is just further indication that everyone will know someday. this (that they will be unmasked as a fraud and an idiot) is the cold fear at the heart of every scholar who hasn’t written an article important enough to get them tenure. and i feel like i just got unmasked by the one person who i want badly to impress all the time.

also, my mother called today to say that she just finished having surgery to remove a cancerous growth that the doctor says is rare and that they were pretty worried was going to kill her in a very short space of time. But it’s all gone and she’s going to be ok. But that just makes me feel awful for calling her in the middle of the night on sunday because my stupid arm went numb for a day, and meanwhile she’s thinking she’s dying and not telling me because she doesn’t want me to worry until she knows she’s dying, and then even worrying about me and my stupid numb arm while she’s waiting to go into surgery (which she’s still not telling me about). I don’t think i’ll ever be that good.

I guess I feel like kind of an asshole in general.  I guess it’s been a weird day.

…or have been for a while but i’m just finding out now. this is exciting.  i wanted to migrate to a place where more people also blogged and have been unsure if this or blogger or blogspot was the best place. i have let my livejournal go. i hate that industry blog but don’t want to tell them i’m done because i haven’t backed up the entries and comments, but maybe this’ll be it.

i am going to try to blog more. and i’m going to do erni’s friend’s july of the tiger thing for the next three weeks. i love making lists of stuff and then doing it. i love having my life enriched by social networking and blogging.  i also like being around actual people during the day, but you can’t have everything.  i also like hands that don’t tingle all the time, but i am getting a little less worried that i have MS and a little more sure it is repetetive stress from nintendo DSi and computer typing.

hey guys! guys! also? i installed comments software on my blog? so you could always make a comment if you want. that’s the one thing i never liked about tumblr.  i like comments. i don’t have any artistic or writerly integrity. i am not writing just for myself. i like attention and feedback.

But i don’t have a specific blog in mind and i am too lazy to remember of the ones i should have written when i thought of them. so here are five things about me today:

1) i played hookey from the archive today. i have to go every day next week. except wednesday, when they are closed. i can’t let the days trickle away.  except today i can. today it’s ok. because future me isn’t here right now to tell present me (aka lazy me) what an asshole i am.

2) i still feel stupid about shaming my students for laughing at “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” i thought they were embarassing themselves. like when you’re 13 and you laugh at the goofy haircuts in zefferelli’s romeo and juliet when you have to watch it in class, and then you later realize that the joke was on you.  however, i shouldn’t have turned around and shot them a look and said “it’s satire.”  that made me feel like a nerd who wants to force everyone to like what they like.

3) i woke up at 3:30am and watched law and order until 6am and then slept til 8:30am and then took an adderall, even though i have been not taking it generally, because i wanted to get work done. then i wrote text messages, talked to my mom and played video games for 2 hours.

4) i hate that i want to cook everything that Giada de Laurentis makes.  she seems like she’s probably an asshole.  you can just say “marinara” in your american accent sometimes. i will still believe you are italian.  the number of food network shows that i have season passed on my Tivo correlates directly to how old i am.  (if you count the shows and add it to 27, the age when i began to think like a yuppie-hipster hybrid about cooking and furniture, you will have my current age)

5) Dan found out yesterday that they are going to promo his show so much that we will all be sick of it by fall. and that they may run ads for it on gas pumps.  what if it stays on more than a year? will i be able to order t-shirts and checks with danny pudi’s face on them? will a catchphrase have emerged?

no editing. no spell check. just posting. hey, what happens when i click send to twitter? experiment!